Peter Robbins

Professor Robbins undertook his undergraduate and graduate education in Oxford, gaining a doctorate in physiology in 1981 and qualifying in clinical medicine in 1984. He joined the academic staff of the Laboratory of Physiology – now the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics – in 1985, where he has remained ever since. He has been a Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford since 1985.

Professor Robbins’ academic interest is the integrative regulation of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems in humans. This includes an interest in the physiology of exercise, as exercise provides the greatest single stress on these systems in most normal circumstances. It also includes a particular interest in the roles of carbon dioxide and oxygen in these processes, because they are the principal gases exchanged by the lungs and because they play such a central role in the regulation of both the respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

Professor Robbins played a major role in developing the technique of dynamic end-tidal forcing. This technique enables the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the arterial blood to be set irrespective of any changes in metabolism or ventilation of the lungs. Professor Robbins has used this technique extensively to provide quantitative descriptions, through the use of mathematical models, of the dynamic responses of the lungs and the blood vessels to variations in the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the blood.

Following on from the technique of end-tidal forcing, Professor Robbins developed a chamber in which the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the arterial blood could be maintained constant for many hours/days. This enabled him to study, under very controlled conditions, the slower responses to low oxygen (the so called acclimatization responses to hypoxia) that occur when individuals travel to high altitude. Using this equipment, he was able to show that the respiratory (or ventilatory) acclimatization to hypoxia did not arise through mechanisms involving changes in the acidity of the body fluids as had been previously thought, but rather as a direct consequence of the low oxygen itself.

Over the past decade or so, a very important advance has been the discovery of the family of transcription factors known as hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) that regulate gene expression in response to cellular hypoxia. Much of Professor Robbins’ current research is now focussed on trying to gain an understanding of the role of HIF in the integrative responses of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to sustained hypoxia in humans.

In order to examine the role of HIF in these integrated responses, Professor Robbins has been studying both the effects of known modulators of HIF function in normal subjects and subjects with specific genetic defects of the HIF signalling pathway. To complement these studies, Professor Robbins has developed cellular and molecular techniques to look at differences between individuals in oxygen-regulated gene expression in white blood cells in primary cell culture. In a larger collaboration, he is also trying to understand the genetic changes engendered by the evolutionary adaptation of the world’s high-altitude populations to their low-oxygen environment.  Eventually, the aim is to be able to relate differences in the HIF system at the cellular and molecular level to differences in integrative function.

Further information can be found at Robbins Research